Content processing pipelines use lossless data compression for storage reduction and bandwidth enhancement. The most widely used compression standard, Deflate, is based on Huffman encoding that translates fixed-length symbols into variable length codes that span between one bit and 15 bits in accordance with relative frequency of occurrence of the fixed-length symbols in a processed data stream. A conventional canonical Huffman encoding (CHE) algorithm does not guarantee any maximum bound for code length. Hence, under scenarios where any code length exceeds 15 bits, the entire CHE process is repeated with frequency adjustment for length-limitation, incurring thousands of cycles of latency and diminishing overall compression throughput. Furthermore, emerging compression standards in the industry cause significant increase in the number of symbols that undergo CHE, which in turn causes more frequent code length limitations, compounding the performance penalties incurred due to length limitations.